Alex Ebert Interview – Episode Transcript

THE RESISTANCE – EPISODE 17 Alex Ebert interview – Episode Transcript Alex: Why is the static life so revered and the evolving life so distrusted and cast aside? [intro] Matt: So the other day, I heard a quote. And I think it’s appropriate to just lead right out with it. Bill Reynolds, a music producer and a member of the group Band of Horses, has a mantra in his studio that he just says, “Let’s ruin our careers today.” Jay, what do you think of that quote? Jay: I think it’s an awesome quote. I mean, I know what he’s trying to say. I guess in the greater context of everything, just going beyond what you’re doing at all costs is…. Matt: Yeah, so I was interviewing a young band, and they were entering the studio with Bill, and they had all these questions about what next, and how do we follow up, and Bill’s mantra just kind of challenged them. Like, screw it! Basically, who cares what you’ve done in the past. Go with what you feel you want to do. Not only do I love that quote, I wrote it down the moment they said it, because I just thought, oh that’s such a powerful mantra. But I thought it was a great way to open today’s episode, because as you know, today’s guest is Alex Ebert, who has basically made a career saying, “Let’s ruin my career today, by doing whatever I want.” For those of you who don’t know Alex’s music, he began with the punkish leanings of Ima Robot. Most of you likely know him from right after that. He formed a band called Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, which, there’s no such person as Edward Sharpe. He’s just this sort of hippie trope as he describes him. Jay: Do you know how long it took me to actually figure out there was no Edward Sharpe. It’s like, there’s no Hootie, there’s no Edward Sharpe. What is happening? Matt: There’s no Hootie or Edward! Yeah. We’re allowed to fake things, right. Yeah, he makes up Edward Sharpe. They make it big with the hit “Home” and that album. And suddenly we deal with a decade of Mumfords and Lumineers and all kinds of…. Jay: And Hey Ho’s. Matt: Hey! Hey! Ho! Hey! Jay: Yeah. I think the thing that was just jumping into that, there’s so many good quotes. You guys listen, you’ll know that we open with, we call it a “cold open” in the biz, [laughs] with a quote, a cold quote, and there are so many good ones in here. This guy has just been through so much, pushed through so many things. And one of the things that I think as artists we can all kind of relate too, artists and even just in general, is the expectations of so many different people, and at some point, you’re fighting. If you’re fighting against them, you kind of lose yourself. Because everyone has their own opinion of what you should be doing. And you have to be true to who you are, and you’re the only one that looks at yourself in the mirror in the morning, is kind of what it boils down to. And so you can be pushed or pulled, or you can just walk at your own pace, to your own beat. That’s kind of what Alex talked about through this whole interview. Matt: If you’re not up the moment on Alex’s music, he just released an album this year in which he’s way into hip hop, which is part of his background anyway. It’s just the latest music shift from a guy who’s not afraid to make them. So on today’s episode, we hope you enjoy it. It’s talking to someone who’s just learned how to ignore the industry that was really unfair to him from the very beginning. It’s really a doozy. It’s one of my favorite conversations we’ve had in our short history of The Resistance so far. So we hope you enjoy it. Stay tuned for our conversation with Alex Ebert. Matt: Just to catch us up, before we begin, do you have an encapsulated way to talk about the creative plate that you’re spinning right now? Alex: Trying to sort of forest fire a slow burn. It’s been, this is like one of those three-year, four-year, some straggling pieces of it are over a decade old, this album I’ve been working on. And that’s one area of music. And then there’s a tech company that have been developing, and not just in my mind or on paper, but actual code being written and things being built for the last 5 years, and then a book that I’ve been writing for the last 8 years. So it’s like these multiple mountains, sort of slow grade mountains that do have peaks, I believe, but there’s….I don’t know if you’ve ever been hiking on steep terrain, but there’s this thing called false peaks, where you keep thinking you’re seeing the peak, but it’s just the latest and the most vertical thing you’re going to have to climb until you realize that once you summit that, there’s another many summits. And then finally, you get to that one that really is the fucking end, and it’s a pretty good feeling, but at that point, you have to sort of re-mountain the mountain. Then you have to put it out and hope that you’re still invigorated by the thing. And in some ways, I like that long, slow process, because with each step you take up that mountain, you really have to remember whether or not you actually want to summit that particular mountain, if you even care about that mountain. And I think that that’s re-confirming in a cool way. Matt: By the way, do you work best that way, when there are varied creative outlets – Alex: Multiple – Matt: Yeah. Alex: I do, yeah. I can mono-focus, but I work, work is my favorite thing to do other than playing with my kid. Having some rush of in-love adrenaline. Those are the three things. Work, the rush of love, and hanging with my kid. And work takes up most of that. So most of my friendships are based around the creative process. I open up about my personal life with my creative, whoever I’m being creative with at the time. So given that so much time is devoted to work in general, it’s really nice to have those palate cleansers that are also work and creative. The word creative, or being creative, could be supplanted for the word “work.” If someone out there is like, “wow, this guy is really a serious guy,” it’s not serious at all. [laughs] Matt: Well, Alex, I’d love to dive into the premise here by actually leading out the way we lead out most of our episodes, which is from the book, “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield. And Pressfield opens his book with a couple lines that I’d love to read, and then what I’d love for you to do is just basically say your relationship to that, whether that’s true for you or not. Whether you believe that or not. Or what you’re wrestling with. “Most of us have two lives: the life we live, and the unlived life within us. And between the two stands the resistance.” Like, what’s true in that for you? Alex: I think for me what that would privately boil down to is saying more directly and unshrouded in the sort of cloistered language of poetics and lyrics and things that fucking rhyme, is to just really nakedly say what my thoughts are on any particular matter. To, in a sense, writing, nonfiction sort of writing, just direct words and opinions, is something that as a musician – well, let me de-nude what I’m saying now, because I’m already cloistering it. I’m a fairly sort of political, socio-political sort of observer, thinker, private writer – privateer. And I have some projects that speak to the matter like something called proxy vote, which I didn’t mention because it started to sound like I was bragging about all of the things I haven’t finished. But yep, so this thing called proxy vote. It’s another one of the tech sort of platforms. But it allows anybody to vote on any bill in Congress, sort of in real time, and then I had a SuperPac from 2018. We supported candidates who pledged to use the app that aggregates the will of their own constituency to inform how they would behave in Congress. So in other words, direct democracy kind of thing. And there’s things like that that really put it in the lap of others, but I’m certainly not saying I’d want to be a politician, but rather as a musician, you’re so encouraged not to say precisely what you think, especially when it comes to politics. And you’re encouraged by that, not just by people and your managers and the business itself, but you’re encouraged by that, because the language itself doesn’t sing that well.

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